Barack Obama has promised "change we can believe in" and to "turn the page" in American politics.  His critics accuse him of tempting voters with inspirational rhetoric and the vagaries of hope without a strategy for turning words into real and meaningful change.  Naturally, all campaigns can be criticized for this failure - the best that can be said of political campaigns is that they set the stage for change by shifting the balance and dynamics of politics.  Few candidates actually deliver all of the change they promise because, in the end, few campaigns change the dynamics of politics. Most don't deliver change at all.

Yet, what distinguishes the Obama campaign is that it actually is changing political dynamics and that it actually has a strategy for change.  It is the Clinton campaign that actually lacks a genuine strategy for change any deeper than the candidate's pledges to "fight harder".  Obama's special gift is that he is able to reframe issues in ways that make intuitive sense to the best parts of most Americans.  The result has been that he's consistently found ways to use the values that unite the country - fairness, decency, justice, freedom, creativity, compassion, high aspirations, and (yes) hope - as frames for policies to which he's committed and for building new and more inclusive political unity.  As a result his campaign has activated and mobilized vast numbers of people across age, gender, race, class, and, to some extent, ideological lines.  They attend rallies, volunteer, contribute, caucus and vote.  Instead of PACs and lobbyists establishing their dominance within the campaign, more than a million individual contributors, most quite modest, have financed its operations.  

This values-based mass mobilization is a fundamental paradigm shift in Democratic politics, and it is what is changing the political dynamics of this election. It is a strategy for change.  If the mobilization can be sustained beyond the election, it will change the political dynamics that determine the country's future.  It is a new and powerful catalyst that will fundamentally shift the balance of power and the conventional dynamics of politics.  

Last night has provoked a lot of doom, gloom, and dark theories that Obama will be overwhelmed by the Clinton machine as the contest moves inexorably toward the convention.  I don't think so. Just two weeks ago he was trailing by a fairly large margin across the country.  Now they are in a dead heat. With another week or two he might have won a couple more states last night, including CA, where early voting before his surge probably hurt him by at least a few points.  Others point to his advantage as the contest now focuses on a few states at a time, more caucuses, states where Obama has demographic and organizational advantages.  

The Obama campaign hasn't been perfect, but they've been consistently awfully good.  That means he will do better with Latinos.  (Still, Barack slipped up by talking about black and white children in failing schools last night.  In Chicago, where he spoke, 40% of the kids in public schools are Latinos! That's the kind of slip that needs to be attended to, because it represents so much more.)

There are a whole lot of delegate counts out there, none certain, but all the counts show them very close.  Solid wins for Barack in the next primaries will probably push him into a lead. But it does not look like either of them can swamp the other campaign.  he can't knock her out.  Many suggest it will get very ugly at the convention, but no matter how the FL and MI questions are resolved, the super-delegates will be under enormous
pressure to support the candidate most likely to beat McCain. I expect that the polls will continue to show that's Obama because of his expansive appeal, and because he will be thoroughly tested by then.